The Dragon's Tail

A children’s coloring book of cliffs and crags? Uh, no. Just a quick pen and wash study from a summit photo I took back in 1975. Unfortunately, the smooth Stillman & Bird sketchbook paper doesn’t allow the wash to flow seamlessly like cold press, but even so, I like it. A good experiment, nonetheless. I shall return to this subject again, and see if I can improve. Any guesses where this is? Hint: Gerber and Sink completed the first ascent only four years before we climbed it.

At the summit, we held in our view that wonderful panorama of the Enchantment Lakes Basin, the spiky Prusik Peak, Little Annapurna, and the other peaks of the Stuart Range and the distant forms of the volcanos, Mt. Rainier standing assertively above the rest. Breathtaking! Ebullient, we stood and took photos of each other at the top. Dragontail Peak was no doubt named for the jagged serpentine ridge that dominates its skyline. Not nearly as evident from below, it was prominent and dramatically striking to behold from the summit. The spires were both mythic and medieval in their physical manifestation, like weathered and broken crenellations of an ancient stone castle.

Unfortunately, we could not linger to savor our accomplishments. The original plan was to bivy at or shortly after the summit, not partway up the face. Running against the clock, we cautiously descended the steep snowfields on the backside and hiked down the tedious steep slopes of loose rock from Aasgard Pass to the lakeside boulder field. Moving as fast as was reasonable, we hopped from boulder to boulder, careful not to slip and fall into any void between them and thus suffer a potentially debilitating injury. Accessing the trail on the south side of the lake, we continued out as the sun dropped below the horizon. Dark now, we used our headlamps hiking down the sometimes steep and twisting trail back across the heavy log bridge and the final two miles out to the trailhead.

We were spent, thrashed. Grateful that I was not driving, I gave my fate over to Denny. We clambered into his old VW Beetle and bounced down the potholed forest road, and headed towards home. As we drove through the tiny hamlet of Gold Bar, my head slumped to my chest. It was after 4:00 am on Monday when Denny finally dropped me off. I was not looking forward to the day ahead. And as far as our mountaineering victory, no one at the architectural office would care one bit. Not a whit. And the recognition of that did not cheer me.

This is a brief excerpt from ‘Rolling with the Punches,’ a mountaineering adventure story about our ascent of the North Face of Dragontail Peak. The story is told in my mountain memoir, Banquet of the Infinite, now available as an eBook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

Photos and mountain art are by the author.